Flickr’s recent announcement makes it the perfect place online to archive your entire collection of photographs. All twenty years’ worth of it.

That’s because they’ve decided to give users 1TiB of completely free photo storage on the cloud. This makes Flickr’s offer one of the cheapest of any cloud storage service on the Internet.

Not only that, unlike other services like Google+ Photos or Instagram, Flickr preserves your photographs best because they never downscale your pictures. They keep the full-resolution version available to you at all times.

What’s more, your photos are directly accessible on a wide array of mobile apps, desktop and sites.

So far, so good. What’s not to like?

Flickr is ideal. Yahoo! have really begun investing heavily into its development, but their endeavours have been met with some complaint: the terrible redesign, Marissa Mayer saying that professional photographers don’t exist any more etc.. and the list goes on and on.

For me, there’s one complaint that puts us right back to basics: what’s all that space good for if it’s so difficult to put pictures on it?

That’s right. Uploading and downloading photos on Flickr sucks. It may not be completely the fault but I can think of the following reasons why this is the case:

• slow Internet upload speeds for large files
• web uploader limits you to upload 200 photos at a time (good luck uploading your photo collection of 10k+ photos on there)
• unreliable desktop uploader application, bails out on large uploads
• monthly usage limits

One way to avoid these problems if you use your smartphone’s camera mainly is to use Flickr’s awesome iPhone app. However, for those who prefer more traditional photography (you know, the kind that involves an actual physical camera), managing your photos from laptops and external hard drives is still very relevant.

This is where my new project, Dropflicks comes in.

EDIT: Dropflicks is now cross-platform!

Dropflicks is a cross-platform photo synchronisation client that helps you maintain a backup copy perfectly in sync with your photos on your local drive.

It works in the spirit of Photosync, except it’ll support all three major platforms: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (Ubuntu). It’ll allow users to organise their photos on Flickr as easily as moving files around on the local drive.

The added benefit is that with Dropflicks, you have two live copies of your photo collection: one online on Flickr and the other lives safely on your local drive. You will never lose a photo again. Even if Flickr deletes all your photos through human error.

It’s currently under heavy development, if you’d like to be notified when Dropflicks is launched, sign up to the mailing list!

What do you do when you lose the motivation to finish something you’ve started?
You want it done really badly, but you’re having a slog of a time making any progress.

Stop.

It might just be
that the timing isn’t ideal
that the winds aren’t blowing the right way
that it feels like the gods are conspiring against you.

Don’t fight it.

Take a step back.

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” — Unknown

There’s no really no need to go against the grain.
Do something different.
Zoom out from that storm in a teacup to see the bigger picture.

You’ll find a better route to get to where you wanted to be. Go at that.
And don’t worry: when you do finally get there, you can still revisit that older route.
Except this time, it’ll be on your own terms.

退一步海闊天空 — Take one step back. Wide seas, broad skies.